S.E. Cupp and Joe Scarborough take aim at conservative media

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Political commentators Joe Scarborough and and S.E. Cupp are two of the most prominent conservatives in media willing to criticize other conservatives in a big way.

Both work for MSNBC (which they both acknowledge is a left-leaning news channel). Both wrote columns today targeting their colleagues in the conservative media business.

“Conservatives should celebrate the gains they have made in the media world over the past two decades,” Scarborough wrote for Politico. “But their greatest challenge moving forward is to begin breaking down the walls they have built that keeps them locked inside a comfort zone that distorts political reality and cedes great advantages to Democratic candidates. What conservatives must do instead is dare to think different, apply eternal truths to current realities and then start spreading their gospel of conservatism to the swing voters who have rejected them in five of six presidential races.”

A New York Times Magazine feature this weekend questioned whether the Republican Party can be “saved from obsolence.” In the piece, Cupp is quoted as saying “we [on the right] can’t be afraid to call out Rush Limbaugh.”

After facing criticism from the conservative blogosphere, she dug in her heels in a column for the Daily News today…“[T]he point I was trying to make was that the impulse to defend anything and everything that a party heavyweight says — to the death — has the deleterious effect of making conservatives seem irrational and herd-like,” Cupp wrote. “No one is right all the time, and no one is above reproach. Limbaugh, who has frequently criticized Republicans, knows this better than anyone.” She added: “We’ll never win credibility with new voters if we insist everything that every conservative says or does should be defended and justified.”